I have been trying to create I live version of gentoo which I can run off an external Hard Drive. I have been reasonably succesful using genkernel being able to account for different hardware. Unfortunatly, I have been unable to come up with a way to declare the drive and root fs without running into problems. The hard drive is declared differently in /dev depending on which machine I plug it into, sometimes sda sometimes sdb sometimes hda etc.. Therefore I do not know what to enter into the fstab so that gentoo knows where to boot it from each time. As it stands when I boot, i get an error from grub saying it can't find root, but gives me a prompt to enter its location. After that gentoo loads fine until it gets to the section where it checks the root filesystem for errors. Then it checks the fstab and if what I had entered is different from the entry on this machine it gives me an error and reboots.

If anyone has any ideas how I could fix this or even a way to enter it upon booting that would be amazing.

03-27-2008

Jonathan183

Have you tried LABEL or UUID ?

03-27-2008

TorianIronfist

No, I didn't know you could do that.
That looks like it will work perfectly